Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
Page 42
Enlightened pedagogy taught that rectitude lay not in title, place or birth, but in inner goodness. Classic as an exposure of aristocratic vice was Thomas Day's bestselling Sandford and Merton (1783–9), which went through some forty-five English editions, besides being translated into French and German.82 Tommy Merton was a toff, Harry Sandford a farmer's son. The tale related honest Harry's encounters with Tommy's family, and his revulsion at their values.83 ‘I don't know,’ proclaimed the plain-speaking frontispiece, ‘that there is upon the face of the earth a more useless, more contemptible, and more miserable animal than a wealthy, luxurious man without business or profession, arts, sciences, or exercises’84 – an adage the book illustrated with deadly earnestness. As exemplified by the Mertons, the Quality had no qualities: ‘As to… industry, economy and punctuality in discharging our obligations, or keeping our words,’ Harry commented, ‘these were qualities which were treated there as fit for nothing but the vulgar… the great object of all their knowledge and education is only to waste, to consume, to destroy.’85
Nor would Sandford and Merton and its ilk have any truck with levity. Appeal to the fancy, enlightened writers fretted, and children would prove reprobate, not responsible.86 That is one reason why science was widely commended in children's books: it prized truthfulness and was dedicated to developing reasoning powers. The Newtonian System of Philosophy by ‘Tom Telescope’ taught Newtonianism through the prism of enlightened empiricism.87 ‘All our ideas,’ explained the little Lockean, ‘are obtained either by sensation or reflection, that is to say, by means of our five senses, as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, or by the operations of the mind.’ Selling over 25,000 copies between 1760 and 1800, this book reveals how widely Locke and Newton, associated with humanitarianism, were shaping young minds.
Lucy Aikin's Poetry for Children (1803) rejected ‘the fairy fictions of the last generation’, which were fortunately ceasing to be a threat, for ‘the wand of reason’ had banished ‘dragons and fairies, giants and witches’.88 The Dissenting author also dismissed novels which gave a ‘false picture of the real world’, yet she defended verse, provided it was wholesome and improving. The children's tracts which William Godwin wrote and sold from his bookshop off Oxford Street were in a similar literal-minded and moralistic mould: ‘My ancestors were respectable heads of families,’89 declaims a priggish character abused by a supercilious aristocrat in his Dramas for Children (1808): his parents had ‘bequeathed to me, it is true, a condition in which I am called upon to labour; but I inherit also from them a love of independence, and an abhorrence of every mean or dishonest action’.90 In his didactic tales, little boys – and sometimes even little girls – floor knaves and giants, since reason and justice are on their side (although the matter-of-fact philosopher was careful to give all his fabulous features rational explanations, partly to stave off nightmarish fears of ogres).91
The chief figure in this class of progressive juvenile writing was Anna Barbauld, sister of the Dissenting physician John Aikin. In her influential Evenings at Home: Or the Juvenile Budget Opened (1794–8), slavery and empire are condemned and science, industry and business commended.92 Such heavy-handed moralizing made Charles Lamb mad. ‘Mrs Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery,’ he raged to Coleridge:
Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!… Damn them! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.93
The likes of Locke, the Edgeworths and the liberal Dissenting circles surrounding Mrs Barbauld wanted to enlighten the young for their future as rational, responsible adults: childhood thus formed a stage on the great turnpike of improvement. However, Romanticism would soon be fantasizing childhood as the purest expression of the human and seek to protect it from the developers.94
The model of the malleable child, awaiting improvement, was readily transferred by enlightened thinkers to classes of people thought not, or not yet, fully responsible, notably ‘victims’ of self-induced vices nevertheless believed capable of correction and reform. Enlightened environmentalism held that, since such ‘unfortunates’ had lapsed into error or crime through no real fault of their own, blame should be pinned on circumstances or on the true villains – the libertine who seduced the maid, the heartless society which reduced workers to pauperdom and beggars to thieving (see chapter 9).95 Deliverance would come not, as the churches had prescribed, through confession, prayer or the blood of the Saviour, but through re-education under suitable philanthropic guidance. (For humane-style societies, also see chapter 9.)
The Enlightenment took up the cause of the individual or minority, oppressed by bigotry or superstition. ‘Freaks’ and ‘monsters’ like dwarves and hermaphrodites attracted sympathy and scientific interest – if also voyeurism.96 In enlightened thinking, erstwhile villains might be transformed into victims. In his Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714), the Deist John Toland proposed, for instance, that Jews ought to be accorded equal status in society. Emancipation was attempted through the Jew Bill, passed in 1753, although public clamour led to its revocation in the next year.97 In her novel Harrington (1817), Maria Edgeworth undertook a personal act of reparation for what she came to recognize as her own unthinking anti-Semitism. A previous work, The Absentee (1812), had elicited a complaint from a Jewish reader, on account of its crass stereotyping of a Jewish character. Harrington, a radical revision of The Merchant of Venice, was meant to make amends.98
*
When progressives addressed the relations between enlightened (or enlightening) Europeans and the world's other inhabitants, they often construed such people as children of another kind. Speaking of the ‘wild boy’ of Hanover, Lord Monboddo considered Peter's story ‘a brief chronicle or abstract of the history of the progress of human nature, from the mere animal to the first state of civilized life’.99
The work of discovery proceeded. James Cook (‘I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for man to go’) was the first European to see the Antarctic pack ice.100 Exploration was news. ‘Africa is indeed coming into fashion,’ Horace Walpole told Sir Horace Mann in 1774, upon James Bruce's return from Abyssinia. Five years later, Mungo Park's account of his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa proved a bestseller, 1,500 copies going within months. And, alongside the real, imaginary voyages cued the enlightened for their encounters with the Other: Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Gulliver's Travels, Roderick Random, Rasselas, Vathek or the Marvellous Adventures of the Baron Munchausen. To the moon, to the underworld, to the Pacific or the Indian Oceans – imaginary voyagers ventured everywhere, while a host of literary works featured exotic worlds, like Aphra Behn's immensely popular Oroonoko or the Royal Slave (1688), discussed below.101
‘The great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once,’ rejoiced Edmund Burke: ‘and there is no state or gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same moment under our view.’102 Enlightened minds could thus be proud of opening up the globe: would that not promote the diffusion of knowledge, the unification of mankind and the cause of peace so devoutly wished?103 Such hopes of course fed optimism about the relations between the West and the rest. Progressives believed that navigation and science were demythologizing the Other, debunking such hoary fantasies as the great Southern Continent, while ethnography banished from the maps the ‘monstrous races of men’ – Cyclops, dogheads, the man-eating Anthropophagi and giants – though new ‘savages’ ominously appeared, to fill the gaps they had only just vacated.104
Exotic lands and peoples posed the question of difference. Were the ‘there and now’ of Africa and the Indies exactly the same as the ‘here and then’ of a bygone Europe? Were the tropics living history? And should the ways of strange and faraway peoples challenge the certainties
of the ‘civilized’, as with Man Friday's bewilderment at Crusoe? It was, however, the savagely indignant Swift who put civilization firmly in the dock.105 ‘To say the truth,’ Gulliver blurts out, with regard to European discoveries,
I had conceived a few scruples with relation to the distributive justice of princes upon those occasions. For instance, a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither, at length a boy discovers land from the topmast, they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see an harmless people, are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the king… they murder two or three dozen of the natives… return home, and get their pardon… Ships are sent with the first opportunity, the natives driven out or destroyed, their princes tortured to discover their gold… and this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people.
‘But this description, I confess,’ concludes Swift's hero with evident relief, ‘doth by no means affect the British nation.’106 Indeed, the pretensions of Europeans to be lords of human kind were attacked and mocked, and anti-colonial thinking ran strong. Locke denied any right of conquest, Adam Smith shuddered at its economic and strategic costs, while others adopted the humanitarian stance. ‘I do not much wish well to discoveries,’ opined Samuel Johnson, ‘for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery.’ ‘Emancipate your Colonies!’ was the advice Jeremy Bentham addressed to the French Revolutionaries some years later.107
Growing face-to-face awareness of human diversity prompted the construction of enlightened anthropologies.108 Difference had customarily been explained by the Bible narrative. Just a few thousand years previously, mankind had been created in Eden. In the dispersal of tribes, by consequence of the Noachian Deluge and the Tower of Babel, corruption had set in, resulting in a multiplication of degenerate tongues, faiths, myths and customs while, thanks to the curse of Ham, his seed had sunk into blackness and barbarity. This Christian master narrative, postulating monogenesis (the original unity of the human race) and a descent from civilization into savagery, commanded broad support. It offered a plausible framework for empirical studies – for instance, comparative analyses of religion – and moral directives, too: natives had to be treated with Christian justice, since all were God's children. Such views still informed the inquiries of Britain's most distinguished early nineteenth-century anthropologist, James Cowles Prichard, author of Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1813). By then, however, that Quaker-born Edinburgh-educated pupil of Dugald Stewart was on the defensive, energetically combating new naturalizing theories, which owed something to observation if as much to speculation.109
Stadial sociologies of the kind developed by John Millar (surveyed above in chapter 10) shaped enlightened anthropology, purporting as they did to trace not degeneration from Paradise but man's progress from primitivism. The enlightened ‘rudeness to refinement’ reference frame challenged the biblical account at various points. It questioned regression from an initial Edenic state, and it also suggested that evidence of similar beliefs and customs among populations worldwide was to be read not, as heretofore, as proof of dispersion from a common source, but as indications of parallel psychological responses to those archetypal traumas faced by primitives the world over: fear, wonder, helplessness, ignorance.110
Racial differentiation – Why are some people black? was the way the question was posed – also became problematized. Enlightened discourses came up with various solutions. Some held that negritude was a product of living in the tropics, perhaps even a beneficial adaptation to a fierce climate – a solution according with malleability models. Challenging such radical environmentalism, opponents countered that if Negroes had been blackened in the course of time by exposure to the equatorial sun, then why did the skin of their descendants not then lighten after living in colder climes? To others, pigmental indelibility indicated polygenism: blacks formed a distinct species altogether, a separate creation. Addressing the ‘Diversity of Men and Languages’, Lord Kames was one of many who wrestled with the evidence of human variety. He concluded that there must have been special creations,111 hinting that blacks might be related to orang-utans and similar great apes then being unearthed in the tropics.112 Various implications might follow: polygenism might mean that blacks were indelibly different, inferior, yet uniquely adapted to living near the Equator – a way slavery could be rationalized. Debate was heated and unresolved, and there was no single Enlightenment party line, especially as non-Europeans were so diverse as to resist homogenization.
China became an object of study and topic for lively debate,113 as did Hindu India, with the mastering of Sanskrit above all by Sir William Jones, first president of the Asiatic Society.114 Knowledge of Islam was diffused through translations of histories, scientific works and sacred writings, the Koran being translated into English in 1734 by George Sale, and ‘philosophical’ travellers wrote popular texts about the Muslim World, notable among them Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters on the Ottoman Empire.115 With information thus increasing, the ‘orientalist’ debate grew fiercer.116
Stereotypes of the East had been deeply entrenched since medieval times: the great Asiatic emperors were fiendish despots; Islam was a cheat, fabricated by an ‘imposter’; the Asiatic imagination had produced an exotic, sensual, tawdry art. Enlightened thinking somewhat challenged such negative clichés. Deists and unbelievers could find in Islam traces of ‘natural’ religion (a pristine monotheism) surviving better than in Christianity. Mahomet was thus portrayed in Gibbon's Decline and Fall as a heroic figure, and Islam as relatively tolerant of other faiths.117 A favourite device was the ‘noble sage’ (or brahmin), a parallel to the noble savage, who, doing the reversed Grand Tour in Europe, could hold the mirror up to Christendom. Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World (1762) thus featured the wise Chinaman, a certain Lien Chi Altangi, who anatomized the British scene in a series of letters home.118 The vogue for chinoiserie (wallhangings, lamps, carved ivories, rugs, ceramics, patterns) popularized Eastern art – witness the pagoda in Kew Gardens and the Prince Regent's pavilion in Brighton (where Chinese and Indian motifs idiosyncratically merge). There was also a cult of oriental tales, such as in William Beckford's Vathek (1786).
But if some aspects of the Orient received sympathy, underlying assumptions were hardly shaken. Progress theorists found in Asia the great counter-example: stagnation. Flaunting utilitarian contempt for all that was backward, Bentham's acolyte James Mill deemed Hinduism ‘gross and disgusting’, Indian law ‘impossibly backward’ and Indian art ‘rude’. The subcontinentals were dirty, dishonest, effete and disgustingly ‘sensuous’. ‘One shelf of English books,’ Lord Macaulay was soon to conclude, ‘is worth more than all the libraries of India.’119
And what was to be made of the natives of the Americas, Africa and the newly discovered Pacific islands? Christianity had regarded primitives as the heathen sons of Ham or Cain, and such dismissive attitudes were easily secularized and rationalized. The nomadism of the native American Indians placed them at the foot of the Scottish 4-stage civilization pyramid, while Lockeans might hold that their failure to develop agriculture condoned confiscation of the soil they so signally wasted.120
Yet enlightened thinkers could also idealize natives as children of Nature – innocent of Old World corruption, they were virtuous and noble – and Deists might fantasize that they displayed an intuitive knowledge of the Supreme Being. It was the conquering white man who was the true barbarian – especially the Spaniards incited by blood-thirsty priests. Such views fuelled the cult of the noble savage.121
Herein also lay some of the roots and rationales for the mounting critique of slavery.122 As of 1700, few publicly questioned the slave trade's propriety: it was integral to the commercial economy which ensured Britain's greatness. The institution might be euphemized, one author writing in 1740 not of ‘enslaving’ but rath
er of ‘ransoming the Negroes from their national Tyrants’ by transplanting them to colonies where ‘under the benign Influences of the Law, and Gospel, they are advanced to much greater Degrees of Felicity’. Indeed, idealization had been possible: James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764) presented contented black swains enjoying the pastoral idylls of the plantations:
Well-fed, well-cloath'd, all emulous to gain
Their master's smile, who treated them like men.123
Sentiments, however, changed rapidly and radically. Nobody, surely, was born a slave – did not Locke's refutation of Filmer show that, in the state of Nature, all were free? Servitude must thus be the product of violence and injustice. The conspicuous humanity and cultural achievements of Africans living in England – for instance, the writer Olaudah Equiano or Sterne's friend Ignatius Sancho – proved that they were not the depraved sons of Ham.124 Moreover, the law was gradually turning. In 1772, Lord Mansfield, in delivering the judgement of the Court of King's Bench in the case of the slave James Somersset, seemingly ruled that slavery was illegal within Britain itself.125
Leading Enlightenment figures joined a swelling chorus of castigation.126 ‘Slavery… is a crime so monstrous against the human species,’ wrote that unfailing barometer Thomas Day, ‘that all those who practise it deserve to be extirpated from the earth.’127 In 1791, his Lunar Society friend Josiah Wedgwood manufactured thousands of cameos of a kneeling slave, manacled hands raised in supplication, bearing the motto: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Meanwhile, another member of the Society, Erasmus Darwin, decried the trade in verse:
Hear, oh, BRITANNIA! potent Queen of ideas,
On whom fair Art, and meek Religion smiles,
How AFRIC's coasts thy craftier sons invade